Greed is a Sunk Cost
“Greedy capitalists,” “Era of Greed,” “Capitalism is about Greed,” and other epithets are often used to justify economies based more on command than market choice. Are such slurs warranted?
True, greed is often rewarded in a capitalist system, and it is more socially accepted in capitalist societies than in other societies. But greed does exist in other societies, only the results of greed are far uglier.
In traditional caste systems, where ownership is primarily by inheritance, greed gets manifested by the killing of family members. If your older brother is to inherit the family estate, your best path to economic advancement is to kill him. This was a common occurrence in feudal Europe. The real barons of old made the later robber baron capitalists look like teddy bears. This situation could lead to serious bloodbaths in societies which allowed polygamy, as was the case in the Ottoman Empire and ancient Israel. Open your Bible to the stories of the sons of Gideon and David when you are in the mood for some chilling tales. In such societies, greed can lead to incredible evil, but it still exists.
Or consider a communist system; this could be anything from a shared apartment up to Marxist country. Greed manifests itself through sloth. Leisure time is valuable; doing the dishes is unpleasant. While you cannot increase your income in a communist system, you can increase your effective pay rate by working less, or raise your standard of living by only doing the more pleasant jobs. At the small scale, such greed can lead to a dirty apartment. Scaled up, the results can be mass starvation as has happened in many Marxist countries (and happened to the Pilgrims, who were originally communists). The remedies range from unpleasant bickering and other social pressure up to secret police and slave labor camps. Greed leads to evil, but it still exists.
Selfishness will never go away. Those who help themselves survive. It is practically a tautology. A good society is one which is organized to pleasantly deal with this reality.
This is not to say that selfishness is the only human motivator, or that it should be celebrated over other impulses as Ayn Rand advocated. Far from it! As I will show later, there is no complete substitute for altruism, for benevolent idealism. But such benevolent idealism is a scarce commodity, too scarce to be squandered where self-interest can do the job.
Further Reading
Even with religious fervor to back them, the Pilgrims had difficulty making communism work. See The Founders Constitution, Volume 1, Chapter 16 from University of Chicago Press. This is a selection from William Bradford describing the effects of backing off on the original communist charter of the Pilgrims.
For a bit of fun, see this satirical report from "The Onion," Marxists' Apartment a Microcosm of Why Marxism Doesn't Work. Warning, this article contains four letter words.
Copyright 2003, Carl S. Milsted, Jr. All rights reserved.
